Continuous Improvement

Achieve operational excellence

Focusing on continuous improvement means making an ongoing effort to enhance processes, products or services. When doing so, companies aspire for the highest level of operational excellence. In practice, continuous improvement implies gathering improvement suggestions and best practices from employees in order to utilize them across organizational borders. Sharing this kind of information amplifies the effect of operational efficiencies. A clear forum with low threshold should be in place to get the most out of the tacit knowledge residing in the firm.

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The challenge

Unfortunately, exceptional ways of working or even simple improvement suggestions do not see daylight very frequently. Employees keep their ideas to themselves even though their ways of doing things could potentially benefit the whole organization. Sometimes people are just too shy or selfish to share their ideas. Yet, most of the time the hindrance lies in company culture: employees simply do not think about showing initiative since it is not an established habit.

Also more concrete aspects can pose challenges to continuous improvement. Physical barriers between countries of operation, strong organizational hierarchies or different focus areas can build a fence for knowledge that might be mutually useful. One reason can as well be the lack of structured approach for gathering improvement suggestions and the excess power of word of mouth.

The solution

Companies that promote a culture of continuous improvement communicate to employees that their thoughts and expertise are trusted. However, to convert the fruitful mindset into real actions, a forum designed for expressing improvement initiatives is needed.

Viima has worked ideally for this purpose in many companies. The platform offers an easy predefined route for personnel to articulate their tips and tricks for improved productiveness. In other words, it works as an online suggestion box. Contrary to traditional ones, this modern version supports transparency that spreads the good practices across different functions to the whole organization.

Using Viima connected our employees working on the field to the decision-makers at the headquarters in a totally new way. It enabled us to quickly get important information from our clients, customer service personnel and maintenance staff. We have successfully implemented many of the shared ideas!

What I especially like about the tool is that it is totally independent of time and location: even the remote workers can use it easily whenever they want on their mobile devices. Besides, I've always felt that Viima is a partner you can trust, as demonstrated by both the product and their service.